Re: Husserl: transcendental subjectivity

>The "interest" from a Heideggerian POV is only in terms of 
>opposition, I believe, not compatibility. Although Husserl 
>distinguishes between the natural and "personalistic" attitudes, he 
>*never* makes the distinctively Heideggerian claim that the natural 
>attitude is deprived in comparison to the practical attitude. That, 
>I believe, is the crucial step which allows Heidegger to escape the 
>solipsism (albeit "transcendental" solipsism) from which 
>sympathizers of Husserl have been trying to dig themselves out for 
>decades, "appresentation" and "empathy" notwithstanding.
>
>Anthony Crifasi

Hi Anthony,

The more I read of Husserl the more I find him strangely compatible 
with Heidegger's existential analytic. The distinction between the 
naturalistic and personalistic attitudes is an interesting one, and 
Heidegger himself points out that for Husserl the overall meaningful 
context of lived experience (or 'social being') is not itself founded 
in objectivity, in the natural attitude, since "the attitudes are not 
even on the same plane, for the naturalistic is subordinated to the 
personalistic" (HCT, p. 122/169). Husserl is very clearly moving away 
from the problematic of Ideas 1, away from the transcendental ego, 
and even Heidegger recognizes the importance of this move. He even 
claims that his criticism inspired it.

>In Husserlian philosophy, the ontological structure of things is 
>seen most fundamentally in the mode of thoughtful reflection, 
>whereas for Heidegger, this is simply not the case.

Well Heidegger has always struck me as a 'thoughtfully reflective' 
thinker, but I assume that isn't quite what you mean with Husserl. If 
you're suggesting, as Heidegger constantly implies in various texts 
from this period, that Husserl is concerned merely with a subject's 
thoughtful mediation of perception/time/practice etal, as if he's 
some sort of uncritical Cartesian rationalist, then all I can say is 
that this is a gross misrepresentation of Husserl's phenomenology 
(and Descartes probably as well).

In Ideas 2 the practical attitude is not a function of reason, nor of 
beliefs, but rather is associated with a non-thematic 'background' 
understanding (Dreyfus anyone?) and its perceptual and practical 
horizons. What I find interesting here is that Husserl outlines the 
relation between the temporality of perception and the 
protentional/retentional structure of practical experience. He's 
basically positing the question of how present perception (presence) 
relates to past experience such that we can simply pick up the hammer 
and use it without thinking about it. It is a decidedly 
non-rationalist approach to the problem of practice and one that I 
find is strangely analogous to Heidegger's problem in the Basic 
Problems of Phenomenology. It's the question of the temporal relation 
between presence and praxis.

Regards,

Malcolm Riddoch



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